28. Chapter 28
Serenity
Three cars came up the drive this morning, and none of them came inside.
They stopped at the top with their engines running.
Men got out, spoke to the guards, and the cars went back down the hill without them.
I counted from the landing window. There are four more men on that wall tonight than there were yesterday.
Marthe burned a tray of bread before noon.
“Don’t say anything,” she said when I came into the kitchen. “The oven’s possessed, and I’m too old for it.”
The oven is fine. She’s had that oven twenty years.
I’ve been in the study since four with my feet up on his chair. The Montaigne is open on my knee. I can’t read it, but I know whose handwriting is in the columns, and lately that’s been enough to make me hold the book anyway.
Not today.
My wolf won’t lie down. She’s been up since the cars came. Head raised, ears forward, watching the study door. She’s held that watch for two hours.
What is it?
She doesn’t tell me. She keeps watching the door.
He’s been out every night this week. He leaves after dusk, comes back late, and when I ask, he says business. Tonight he went out the moment the sun was down—I heard the car—and tonight there are extra men on the wall. Something’s going on, and it’s happening soon.
He comes back at half past six. I hear him on the flagstones, and by the time he reaches the doorway I’ve got my face arranged. Then I stop caring about my face, because I’ve caught something.
Cold air. Wet road. And underneath, other people. Wolf…more than one. And under the wolves, something dry and warm and scorched at the edges.
Dragon.
I know that smell. I spent a year with my back against a wall that smelled exactly like that, talking to the woman on the other side of it.
Kalli.
He’s been standing close enough to a dragon to carry the smell home, and he’s never said a word to me about dragons.
My wolf comes straight up the front of my chest and growls so hard it comes out of my throat.
Maximilian has been curled on the windowsill for the last two hours. He comes up onto his feet, hisses—at me, not at the door—then drops down and stalks out of the room. He’s never done that. He sleeps on my lap most evenings.
Who has he been with?
“You’ve been out,” I say.
“I have.”
“With shifters.”
He stops. Then he shuts the door behind him.
“Your nose is working.”
“My nose is working very well. Better than it ever did.” It’s something I’ve wanted to talk to him about, but he’s never around. I put the book down. “And you’re dressed.”
He is. Not the way he dresses in this house. The dark suit, the good one, cut close. The way he looked the first time I ever saw him, walking down a corridor full of women in silk.
“I’m going out again later,” he says.
“How much later?”
“Later.”
He crosses the room, lifts my ankles off the arm of his chair, sits down, and puts my feet back in his lap. Then he stops moving. One hand closes around my ankle and stays there.
I wait.
I know how his evenings go now. He comes in. We talk. Somewhere in the middle of it, his hand ends up in my hair then moves lower, and I’ve stopped pretending I don’t want it.
This isn’t that.
“You’re being strange,” I say.
“Am I?”
“You’ve been in here five minutes, and you haven’t once looked at my throat.”
“I’ve looked at your throat.”
“Not the way you look at it.”
He hasn’t fed from me since the night he took too much.
At first that was me. I was angry, and I kept my distance, and he let me.
Then I stopped being angry, and he still didn’t come near my neck.
Last week I wore my hair up at dinner, pinned off my shoulders where he couldn’t miss it.
He spent the whole meal looking at his glass.
And then he gave me a watch with so many diamonds on it that I can’t read the time.
I keep landing on the same explanation, and I hate it. Something about that night finished it for him.
He turns his head. The lamp is behind him, and I can’t see much of his face.
“Do you want me to?”
“Ask me that again when you’re not using it to dodge something else.”
“It was a reasonable question.”
“It was a distraction, and you’re good at those.” I pull my feet back and sit up. “Who came up the drive this morning?”
“I brought you something.”
Oh, that’s low. That’s very low.
He takes it off the side table. It’s wrapped in cloth, bigger than both his hands, and heavier than I expect when he sets it in my lap.
I know what it is before the cloth comes off. The silver bird in its silver cage. The keyhole in the base with no key in it.
“You’re giving me your bird.”
“Yes.”
“It doesn’t work.”
“Wind it.”
There’s a key in the lock now. New metal, bright against the old base, cut for this keyhole.
I look at him. He doesn’t say anything. So I turn it.
Seven turns, and it stops.
The bird lifts its head. It opens its beak, and it sings.
It isn’t much. Eleven notes, maybe twelve, thin and high, cracked at the top of the run. The little silver head turns twice on the way through. Then it stops with its beak open, exactly the way it has sat on his table since the day I got here.
I frown. “You told me nobody alive could fix it.”
“I thought that was true when I said it.” He’s watching the bird, not me. “It turned out to be a difficult thing to be certain of.”
“So how—?”
“I found a man outside Geneva. He’s eighty-one. His grandfather worked on the original and left him the drawings, and nobody had asked him for them in sixty years.”
“What did it cost you?”
“He wouldn’t take money. That was inconvenient.”
“Then what did he take?”
“Something I don’t need.”
I rest my hand on top of the cage. The metal is cold under my palm. My throat has gone tight, but I’m not letting him see me cry, so I look at the bird until it passes.
“You told me you paid a fortune for this,” I say. “For a bird that doesn’t work.”
“It works now.”
“But why would you give it to me?”
“Because I like giving you things. You loved the bracelet, didn’t you? And the emeralds.”
“Of course I did. And all the other stuff. I’m not ungrateful. I’m just curious.”
“Stop being curious and enjoy it.”
First the bracelet. Then a painting by an Old Master. Now the bird he loves more than anything. He’s stopped taking the one thing he ever wanted from me, and he can’t seem to stop giving me things instead. I don’t like what that looks like.
It looks like a man paying off a debt.
Or saying goodbye.
He lifts the cage out of my lap and sets it on the floor beside the chair, careful with it. Then he pulls me off my seat and into him.
I go. I don’t decide to. His hands come, and my body goes. That’s just how it is with us now.
He settles me against his chest with my legs over the arm of the chair. One hand rests between my shoulder blades. Then he stops.
I wait for it. His hand moving down my back. His mouth at my neck. The press of his teeth.
It doesn’t come. It never comes anymore, and I’ve stopped pretending I don’t miss it.
He holds me. That’s all he does. His arm around me, his chin somewhere above my head, and not one finger moving toward anything.
I don’t know what to do with a man who just wants me here.
“You can say something,” I tell his shirt.
“I don’t want anything tonight.”
“Nobody says that.”
“I’m saying it.”
“You’re a vampire. You always want something.”
“Yes.” His hand moves once between my shoulders. “I have it.”
I should leave it there. I don’t.
“You haven’t fed from me since that night.”
His hand stops on my back.
“No,” he says. “I haven’t.”
“Why not?”
“You know why.”
“I know what you told me. You lost control, and it won’t happen again.” I sit up enough to see his face. “Fine. I’m fed now. I’m strong. I’m sitting in your lap. So either you’re afraid, or you don’t want me anymore. Which is it?”
He holds my eyes.
“Wanting you has never been the problem,” he says.
“Then feed.”
“Not tonight.”
I stop talking after that. There’s nowhere left to go that doesn’t end in the same two words.
The fire goes down in the grate, and neither of us gets up to fix it. My cheek is on his chest, and there’s no heartbeat under my ear. That used to bother me. Now the quiet of him is the steadiest thing I’ve got.
My hands are open on his shirt. I don’t remember them letting go of it.
At some point I stop listening for the door.
I sleep. I’m not sure how long I’m out. It can’t be long. I come back with my face creased against his shirt and his hand on my back. My first thought is that I fell asleep on a vampire, and my second is that I don’t care.
“Serenity.”
“Mm.”
“Tell me about your sister.”
I go still against him.
He’s never brought her up since that first dinner, when I asked him to find out what happened to her and he told me he’d look into it.
Nothing ever came of it. I’ve said her name to him twice more since then, and both times he let it lie there, and I was almost grateful.
Because the answer to that question might be something I don’t want to hear.
“Why?”
“I’d like to know about her.”
I sit up so I can see him. He lets me.
“She’s smaller than me,” I say. “Everyone always thought she was the younger one. She isn’t.
She used to climb into my bed during storms, right up until she was about fifteen.
Then she stopped, and I never found out why.
” My voice stays level. “She’s better at controlling the glamour than I am.
Much better. Our grandmother used to say Grace could walk out of a room while you were looking at her. ”
His hand tightens once on my back.
“Serenity,” he says.
“Yes?”
His mouth opens, and then it closes.
“What?” I say.
Silence.
“Bastien. What?”
“Nothing.” He puts his hand under my jaw and lifts my face. For a second I think this is it, this is the feeding, and my whole body leans into the thought before it lets go again. “Eat something tonight. Marthe’s cooked for eight again.”
“You had a whole other sentence ready before that one.”
“No.”
“Say it.”
“Not tonight.”
“I’m so tired of hearing not tonight.”
“I know.” He bends and puts his mouth on my forehead. He stays there a long time. Long enough that I get both hands into the front of his shirt and hold on.
Then he’s up, and moving, and out the door before I’ve got my feet under me.
I give it four seconds. Then I go after him. Not tonight means he’s buying time, and I want to know what for.
I get as far as the top of the stairs.
He’s at the front doors with Yves. Both of them have their backs to me, and neither of them hears me…and he always hears me.
Then a smell reaches me up the stairwell, thin and sour, and it takes me a moment to place it, because in all my time here I have never smelled it on Yves.
Fear.
“—the same as we discussed,” Bastien is saying. “She doesn’t go past the yew after dark.”
“And the men on the wall?”
“They stay. All of them stay.” A pause. “Take care of her.”
“My lord.”
Then his voice drops, and I only get pieces. If it goes wrong, you get her out. You don’t wait for word. Yves answers with something about dawn in it. Bastien says a name I’ve never heard. Then a sentence goes past with she isn’t to know sitting in the middle of it, and the rest is lost.
I stand at the top of the stairs with my hand on the rail.
I could go down there. I could put myself between that man and that door and make him tell me what’s going on.
He’d tell me it was business. Yves would say nothing, because Yves always says nothing. Even when he’s talking, he says nothing.
Why? Why is he doing this?
I go back up. And I know, while I’m doing it, that this is the part I’ll regret later. I turn around, and I walk back to the study, and I let him leave.
The front doors open. Cold comes all the way up the stairs. The doors close.
Then the car on the gravel, going down the hill fast.
Marthe finds me in the study twenty minutes later with a tray she puts down on the desk without being asked.
“Sit and eat it. He said.”
“He says a lot of things.”
“He does.” She straightens a fork that doesn’t need straightening. Then she stops with her hand on the tray. “You’ll want an early night tonight, love.”
She’s never called me that.
She’s gone before I can ask what she means, and she shuts the door behind her, which she never does either.
So I sit on the floor by the fire with the cage beside me.
My wolf gets up. She crosses the whole length of me and stops, facing the window, and stands there with her ears forward. Not the door anymore.
The window.
I take the key and turn it seven times.
The bird lifts its head. It opens its beak and sings its eleven notes into an empty room. The last one cracks, the same as before. Then it stops, beak open, quiet.
Somewhere down the hill, a second car starts.